Poll winner, feature creep, AI and more (Patreon)

It's June and that means it's time for another quick talk!

Maude takes the win

It looked close for a while but in the end it really wasn't. Maude Apatow took the win in my very uninspired may's poll, leaving Alexa Demie in the dust with a 12 vote lead and once and for all showing that you guys don't seem interested in trans celebs. Message received on that :)

I'll be posting June's voting round soon.

About feature creep

I wanted to talk about feature creep. I recently read an article on this concerning Star Citizen and I kinda recognized myself in it more than I wanted to. I have so many ideas for this game and I tend to have a hard time not implementing them. It's not that the ideas are bad. Most of them are fun in theory, it's just that they tend to be ideas that would be more suited to add later on when the base game is more polished.

A month or two back I spent way too long on creating a system where certain celebrities will recommend you books in conversation. I coded a list to keep track of them and conversation topics to circle back and everything. It's fun and it works well but it's not really necessary... It took a day that could have and probably should have been spent better.

Don't get me wrong: this update is taking ages mostly because I broke everything in the entire game by redoing the way characters work, by rewriting the entire story and adding a bunch of necessary features like relationships, apps and dates. It's not just feature creep, but it is an issue.

I want to dial back and dilute some mechanics. Especially dates and sex for now. I was making them way too complicated. The amount of variables I set up for the new sex mechanics is kinda ridiculous (I'm talking 100+, tracking which fluids are on which body parts and shit). It's all cool in theory but the difference will be small if I skip half of them. The same goes for dates. I was randomizing food and drink orders, spending time and code on something that won't matter at all for the scene in question.

I have been playing some Tomodachi Life recently in my spare time and it has shown me that a game like that doesn't have to be complicated to be quite fun. I'll be using it as (light) inspiration while building the last mechanics. I want a world where you meet characters everywhere, where they meet each other and where you're constantly building relationships. The interactions themselves don't have to be extremely detailed to the point you know what drink your date is having. It should be simple, interactive and quick.

AI: yes or no?

There's been some drama about AI in the game industry in the past years. I myself have never used much of it for visuals, mostly because of moral/legal reasons (celebrity fakes are not something I want to burn myself on). I kinda like the way this forces me to use real footage creatively. I have used AI in coding, of course. It saves me countless hours in finding errors or changing stuff in massive objects, although 98% of my game is still just coded by hand.

But AI images are getting better and better. What about some of the miscellaneous images? Would it be bad to generate some banners for locations? No celebrities, just environments, items etc. It has little to no copyright or moral implications and it could definitely spice up the game.

Let me know what your opinions are, if you have any.

So yeah that's about it. I'm still busy adding girls, coding stuff, fixing bugs, writing stories and building the best game I can. We're getting there. Slow and steady.

Thanks for everyone's continued support. June poll coming soon! Suggestions are welcome.